Caught Rapping on Video

Aaaaaah. I hate the way I look on video. But I do rap, and that's something of a consolation, right?

Yesterday the amazing Sawyer Novack and I got interviewed about 1/20, the movie I wrote and he costarred in. We were promoting the first New York City screening of the film -- which is happening on Sunday, November 6 (see below). He was a really good sport. And we saw each other for the first time since filming, and (now I'm going to sound like a grandparent or something) he's at least twice as tall as he was when we shot it, and he's been up to all this other stuff. For instance:
New Anti-Smoking Ads Warn Teens 'It's Gay To Smoke'

That's right. SAWYER IS ON ONION.TV. (And it is totally offensive, and hilarious. Sawyer comes in at 1:55 if you're squeamish.)

And, yes, we're going to be screening the movie live! It's at the Branded Saloon in Brooklyn. It's a "brunch screening" at noon, whatever that means. Come and figure it out with me. (Oh, and here's Part 1 of yesterday's interview, which I'm putting on the bottom because I fidget a lot at the beginning. I know. Diva.)

I Hate Christmas

We are in the strange void between Hanukkah and Christmas, a time where Jews are already sick of being proud and silver-and-blue glitter and singing Maoz Tzur, while the rest of the western world is just about to kick their holiday into high gear. I know it's not fair to pit our minor (though fun) holiday against the birth of the central dude of the Christian religion. But I can't really help it. Kyle Broslovsky was right: it is hard to be a Jew on Christmas. Which doesn't at all explain the song that Josh Lamar and I put together called "I Hate Christmas." It's actually about, uh, why I like Christmas. You can listen to it free right there, or you can download the whole mini-EP for just $1. It's so worth it...both because it's good music, and because you can crank it loud enough to drown out all that Christmas music on the radio. What's interesting is the way this came about. Joshua Lamar, the non-Jewish drummer for the Jewish punk band Can!!Can, asked me if he could have some of my spoken-word tracks to play with. I sent him a volley of a bunch of them -- a while Christmas sack full of presents, you could say -- and the one he picked to work on first is the Christmas one. So take a listen! And, by the way, there's some raw language on it, just as a warning. I'm still kind of nervous about posting this -- much more nervous than posting the Hanukkah songs that we commissioned a few weeks ago -- but, then again, it's a whole different ball game. After all, "Mi Yimalel" and "Maoz Tzur" were written by great people thousands of years ago. This is just me ranting about Bob Dylan and Bette Midler. What do you think?

Were the Maccabees Jerks?

This morning I got my Hanukkah Project CD, a new compilation record. My band Chibi Vision contributed a song to it, "The Maccababies" -- which, I guess, was an extension of what I've been thinking about this year.

Amanda from The Bachelorettes, one of the other bands on the comp, was telling me about playing our song for her class. (She also happens to teach a Hebrew School class in Jackson, Mississippi.) It's a pretty fun song -- anyway, I like to think so -- casting the Maccabees as underdogs fighting against an invading army. It begins, "The Maccabee guerrillas, hiding in the trees, just chillin'/Till injustice starts pervading/We could use a little savin'." Ever since I was a kid, I loved that image -- of someone hiding out in a tree, maybe a soldier about to attack, but foremostly of someone scared out of his mind, running for his life, and safe, if only for the moment. {I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that you can hear the song here, or just order the album!}

And that's how I always thought of the Maccabees. As these little guys on the run, just tryin' to believe what they believe without someone trying to stomp them out.

"One kid said something about defeating the Iraqis," Amanda told me. "And I was like -- wait a second. In the Hanukkah story, the Jews were the ones who were occupied!"

It's true, and more than a little scary, that the Hanukkah story can be read as an allegory both for seizing the day from fascist, Nazi oppressors as well as seizing the day from democratic American oppressors. But when I was working on a totally different assignment, writing the script for this year's Chanukah episode, I kept inadvertently using words like occupation and resistance, and then having to go back and replace them -- words that have quite a specific connotation in contemporary America, and especially in the Jewish community.

Oh my G-d, I thought. I'm actually in denial. Or I'm a hypocrite. And then I started to analyze my own way of thinking. (As I write this, Dan Sieradski has just tweeted, "i think macy's should have a chanukah window, like their xmas display, with maccabees forcibly removing helenized jews' foreskins.") When I was getting my anthropology degree, one of my professors was fond of saying that the difference between calling something a dialect and calling it a language was as simple as having an army. In other words, it's the big guys who can call the little guys little. Or, in simpler terms, history is written by the winners.

For me personally, a lot of these battles of meaning comes down to autonomy: which culture is going to forbid the other from doing what they want? (Or will neither?) But I recognize that my point of view isn't the only one. It's the scariest thing about writing a children's song (and, by the way, the scariest thing about being a parent) -- but it's also the most beautiful: That, no matter what you say, kids are going to find their own meanings, and their own methods of interpretation. There are huge differences between the Maccabees fighting for freedom of religion and any similarities between any other groups, whether positive or negative. But there's also a lot of universal truth to it.

Amanda's class, I think, are the only ones who really get what's going on. In the end, she tells me, they decided: "It's more complicated then they thought. A lot of times, there aren't good guys and bad guys."

Which, in my thoughts at least, hits the nail on the head.

How to Write a Hanukkah Song

The rest of the world is still eons away from Hanukkah. If you're super-prepared -- like my mother, for instance -- you're just starting to think about buying Hanukkah presents*. If you're like me, you'll realize on December 1 that Hanukkah starts on December 11, and think you have tons of time, and then on December 11, as Shabbat is starting, you'll totally freak out that you haven't bought anyone presents yet.

But this year is different than all other years. Why, you ask? Because I wrote a Hanukkah song.

I sat down with my songwriting partner, Mista Cookie Jar, months ago. At first I wasn't sure which direction we were going to take. How could I? It was early November, still basically Halloween. Anyway, my thoughts were a lot closer to shofars and sukkahs than menorahs and Maccabees. It's exactly like department stores that put up Christmas trees in early fall, or hosts who put out dessert while you're still eating dinner. By which I mean to say: you're not in the right head space.

So, when my friend Patrick Aleph of the Southern Jewish punk band Can!!Can came knocking -- one of his friends, Amanda from The Bachelorettes, wanted to put together a Southern Hanukkah record -- we had to rise to the call of duty. (I'm from Philly, but Cookie Jar is from West Virginia, and we both like grits.) It's true that, in my slam-poetry gigs, I do a poem called Dreidel Maven (download the mp3 free!), and I perform it year-round. I also have a chapbook called Dreidel Spinning Champion of the Universe, but the title refers more to being a twelve-year-old boy than to the divine miracle of everlasting olive oil.

So we could go in the direction of kitsch. And, fortunately, Hanukkah is replete with kitsch: menorahs, latkes, sufganiyot, gelt, even chintzy Maccabee costumes. And, closely related, the direction of cheesy rhymes, which Adam Sandler pioneered, and subsequently ruined for all other potential Hanukkah songwriters, ever.

But you know what? Adam Sandler can keep it. I didn't want to rhyme Hanukkah with Veronica or harmonica or marijuanica or anything else. I wanted to write about something cool. Something indie. Something revolutionary.

The story of Hanukkah is a hard one, though -- for all that religious people insist that we're not celebrating a military victory, it sounds suspiciously like we're doing just that. A lot of people died. There was a Maccabee army. Sure, they were fighting for freedom, but it was still fighting. Like it or not, we killed people. And it wasn't pleasant.

It got me thinking, though. If the Maccabees existed today, what in the world would they do? Would they be guerrilla soldiers? Social-networking hackers? Marketing pundits? One pop hook later, and after a lot of sugar inhalation, and we got our song: The Maccababies. It's a little frenetic, a little crazy, and a little can't-get-it-out-of-your-head-y, if I do say so myself.

What did we end up with? Well, you can listen to it here. Or you can buy the compilation CD -- made by a bunch of awesome kids in Jackson, Mississippi, with a hand-screened cover, and including temporary tattoos and a dreidel and gelt -- for $10.

While I'd like to think that our song still conveys the spirit, celebration, and giddiness of Hanukkah, it might not call to mind that same vision of snow flurries as "Rockin' around the Christmas Tree" or "Jingle Bell Rock." Maybe just because it doesn't have jingling bells or kitschy rhymes. Or maybe because, when we started writing it, it was still 65 degrees and sunny outside.

_____
* - Hi, Mom! If you're reading this: A new camera, the final volume of X-Statix, and socks. No, not socks.

"Circles" Live with Mista Cookie Jar

I was going to wait till Monday morning to post this, and get the maximum traffic or whatever, but me waiting that long is just not gonna happen.

Mista Cookie Jar just got YouTubetry of some live versions of new songs -- including "Circles," one of the songs I co-wrote for his Love Bubble album, which you can purchase right now for not a lot of money. But, relax. First, just enjoy the songs.

Here's "Magic World," which I didn't write but has CJ workin' it and kids going crazy.



And, now, "Circles."

Free Music, Filipinos, and (how) Jews (look)

Hey, remember our video? The one about how Jews look? The theme song was composed by my very good friend, the astute and fearless C.J. Pizarro -- and, by the way, you can download the mp3 for free or download the whole album, Snow Crabs, if you like.

C.J. is (gasp!) not Jewish. He is, unrelatedly, Filipino -- and together, he and I are in a science-fiction hip-hop band, Chibi Vision, which we used to refer to as an Orthodox Jewish-Filipino cross-cultural multi-platform geek project -- or, to save breath, the "Jew-o-pino team-o."

Anyway: the other day, I received an email from him, sounding as astounded as it is possible for an email to sound. "I found our love child!" he wrote.

The love child in question: Eliyahu Enriquez, a Jewish Filipino poet, publisher, cultural theorist and active Twitterer. After receiving Honorable Mention in Lincoln Center's Robert Nettleton/Ully Hirsh Poetry Prize, he's released several poetry chapbooks, and is currently working on a collection of piyyutim. I've been blasting madly through his stuff, and you should, too. Equal parts irreverent and reverent, his poems are random and play off a big-muscled veneer of stream-of-consciousness, but actually connect and make sense in ways that are both cerebral and factual.

A lifetime of lesion has brought us
Back together in Balikbayan coffins.
His memory is erection.
Forget forgiveness.
Navigate our leather
Phylacteries and arteries.
Toda Rabba for traveling
Cosmos de Vie.
So long,
Galut Graveyard!

That was R.S.V.P. He's grinning in one corner of his mouth and keeping the other corner totally solemn. In "Akhdut," though, he's formal, sentimental, although, curiously, playing it just as cool:

I attended two funerals today
I did not bother to bring an umbrella
Or flower
Or Bible
Or date
A few others did
A few

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11/11, but i wish it was 10/4

Okay, ixnay on the Long Island action. I know it kind of sucks -- all of a sudden, the person who was going to give me a ride isn't giving me a ride, and it's two hours and a surprisingly expensive train ride.

back from Los Angeles. two red-eye flights in 24 hours can knock a boy unconscious...or at least play havoc with at least three of his five senses. it's weird to rebound from rock stardom right back into a day job (and by "right back," i mean plane, subway, office). los angeles was amazing -- there were the obligatory celeb sightings, a hotel room that i wish i'd remembered to photograph (the entire room was done in pale purple and white, and they'd wrapped 50 old distended books in matching jackets) and C.J. pulled up in his car and we recorded two new Chibi Vision songs in his car outside Steven Spielberg's mother's restaurant when the whole neighborhood went black. I was staring at a giant multicolored neon tower when the power finally went back on.

it was glorious.

I'm not Radiohead's biggest aficionado ever, but this site is doing a bunch to convince me. Perhaps because the mp3s are free (and I could buy several Radiohead albums for the price of the train ticket to Long Island), or it might just be my recent obsession with live albums (roots! mike doughty! i just love listening to people who are being listened to by an entire room of people; it's captivating and almost cultlike).

oh, and laura bush is looking into a book deal. but i thought she already had one.